No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are.

The Washington Post's Post Everything blog ^ | May 29, 2014 | Tressie McMillan Cottom

[2ndDivisionVet]

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations.

For some, reparations to African Americans for enslavement and state-sanctioned apartheid (more benignly known as “Jim Crow”) is a shocking case to make. I am a sociologist whose training has been, in part, with economists like Sandy Darity at Duke University and Darrick Hamilton at The New School. For Darity, Hamilton, and many other serious scholars of race, history, and inequality, the matter of reparations is anything but novel or shocking. Neither is it hyperbolic. There are real programs, with feasibility studies and implementation suggestions, and they move far beyond Coates’ call for a spiritual reckoning of the body politic. If you have never heard of them, that is likely by design. Few powerful persons or institutions have ever been willing to seriously put a reparations program before the American people.

But I wager that you have heard a lot about how education and opportunity can be, through hard work and moral fortitude, the path to greater equality for African Americans. In many ways, when the formerly enslaved asked first for a national program to redress the forced, free labor that made the United States the nation we know it to be, they were given schooling instead of redress; opportunity instead of compensation. It is an attitude that persists in our policy and our cultural lexicon. When the demand is for justice, we are most likely to respond with an appeal, instead, to fairness. And in no institution is that more clearly evident than education. There’s just one problem: It’s not good enough.....

[2ndDivisionVet]

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

As a stratification scholar, Tressie considers what inequality means both experientially and empirically when corporations are people, supranational corporations like Facebook and Twitter shape the public square, and education is increasingly privatized. Her research primarily mines organizational arrangements and structural processes to better understand inequality across rapidly changing social domains. Her current work examines for-profit college credentials and inequality. She also has a developing research agenda that examines the political economy of emerging “new” media organizations.

Tressie lectures and publishes widely. She has been invited to speak on issues of education, race, gender, social movements and inequality at MIT, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, Duke, UGA, GSU, UC-Irvine as well as national and international public policy agencies in Canada, New Zealand and across the U.S. Her public writing has appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Dissent Magazine, and The New York Times. Additionally, she has appeared on NPR and Dan Rather Reports. Her academic work has appeared in Contexts, WestJEM (forthcoming), and a textbook from Oxford University Press. Three papers are currently under review: an organizational analysis of admissions at for-profit colleges; an intersectional analysis of college choice among working class black and white women enrolled in for-profit colleges; and, the political economy of social media in identity movements.

In 2014, she was selected as a PhD Intern at the Microsoft Social Media Collective research labs in Cambridge, MA. That research project will examine how students use informal online spaces to form status identities and groups. The paper will be submitted for review. She is also a former research fellow at the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis. As a fellow, she wrote a public policy brief (forthcoming) that examines the link between 1996 changes that purported to “end welfare as we know it” and the rise in for-profit workforce credentials among poor women. She is honored to join the Barnard Center for Research on Women as an organizing consultant for their 40th anniversary Scholar & Feminist conference on gender and education.

With Sandy Darity of Duke University, she is the lead editor of “Profit U: The Rise of For-Profit Higher Education”, forthcoming from AERA books. A second book, a solo-authored manuscript on inequality and for-profit higher education, is under contract with The New Press. So far, her editors have not decided to kick her out of the fold.

Tressie considers teaching a foundational research activity. She teaches introductory sociology courses and has developed seminars in contemporary stratification (post-Great Recession), critical university studies, and technology and inequality. Her students seem to enjoy her pedagogical enthusiasm. To be fair, students do occasionally complain that she threatens to incorporate interpretative dance into lectures. Tressie assumes they doth protest too much.

She can be found at www.tressiemc.com and @tressiemcphd.

[Olog-hai]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations. …

Not even the liberals can come up with a name for the “thing” in question.

[Smokin' Joe]

Ohhhhh Kay.

I propose that every living person held as a slave be paid fair wages by every living slaveowner.

Barring that being good enough, if you don't like it here, how about a one time one way ticket to the third world hellhole of their choice--US citizenship/passport revoked when you get there.

Otherwise, STFU.

[Dr. Ursus]

Being a negro is a job description thing!

[windsorknot]

Unfortunately academia is filled with Tressie Cottoms. Truly intellectual challenges and pursuits are more likely to be found elsewhere.

[EEGator]

In the interest of making things right, we should send all Blacks back to Africa. There they can live out their Utopian dreams.

[Fresh Wind]

A “stratification scholar”? /facepalm

[goat granny]

Since I had a relative (fathers uncle) that fought to “free the slaves” and spent time in the infamous Andersonville confederate prison, I am the one that has reparations owed to me. My family shed blood during the civil war. No one ever owned a slave but shed blood for them.....those that say reparations are the greediest ones and stupid to boot.

[ExTxMarine]

The stupidity and self-righteous is STRONG in this one!

That is NOT a good combination; look what it has done to our Presidency!

[Mark17]

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a thing at The Atlantic making the case for reparations.

You want reparations? Come get it. These slime bags seem to think they can just push and push and push, and nothing is going to happen. Sooner or later, it might erupt into a real shooting war. I hope not, but it can't go on like this indefinitely.

[newnhdad]

I’d give $1,000 if those calling for reparations promised to:
1-STFU
2-Go Away
3-Leave me and my family alone.
4-Stop talking about reparations
5-Stop talking about racism

But since none of that will happen, I’ll keep my money.

[Popman]

Ok...I’m convinced......I’d give them a dollar...

Now go away....

[ImNotLying]

OK, let me try to get this straight. Who exactly is gonna have to pay these reparations? I am a white boy. What if my ancestors came to the United States after the civil war? What if my ancestors came here in the 1700’s but never owned any slaves? What if I am a “white” boy but have some black blood from a previous 300 year old affair? Are all non-black U.S. residents gonna have to pay reparations? Is this a one time payment by every white man over the age of 18 or will my children’s children also have a certain amount they will have to pay. Who will determine the amount of the reparation? Will the ancestors of black slave owners have to pay reparations? Do all blacks get the same amount of reparation pay? I really need to know so I can start my reparation withholding from my paycheck? It will be a cold day in hell before this happens!

[ClearCase_guy]

The people at the Washington Post who are looking for race baiting journalists to publish, would do well to be picking Cotton.

[Hoodat]

Perhaps she should personally ask her President - whose ancestors sold her ancestors into slavery to begin with - when he plans on paying up.

[Kozak]

I’ll pay reparations as soon as I receive the check from Putin for my family being Serfs to the Russians until emancipation in 1862. I expect a bigger check because our enslavement started centuries earlier....

[Timber Rattler]

We wanna handout! We wanna handout!

[ComputerGuy]

gibsmedat, gibsmedat, oh gibsmedat

[ArcadeQuarters]

Reparations? What do you call the trillions handed out in welfare and other programs?